Motivational Quotes

Language

Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire.

- Barthes, Roland

Best Quotes about Language

If you want to tell the untold stories, if you want to give voice to the voiceless, you've got to find a language. Which goes for film as well as prose, for documentary as well as autobiography. Use the wrong language, and you're dumb and blind.

Rushdie, Salman

The downtrodden, who are the great creators of slang.

Burgess, Anthony

As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: you liberate a city by destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests

Vidal, Gore

Language is an archeological vehicle... the language we speak is a whole palimpsest of human effort and history.

Hoban, Russell

Man acts as though he were the shaper and master of language, while in fact language remains the master of man.

Heidegger, Martin

Our language has wisely sensed the two sides of being alone. It has created the word loneliness to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word solitude to express the glory of being alone.

Tillich, Paul

A special kind of beauty exists which is born in language, of language, and for language.

Bachelard, Gaston

A man thinks that by mouthing hard words he understands hard things.

Herman Melville

All official institutions of language are repeating machines: school, sports, advertising, popular songs, news, all continually repeat the same structure, the same meaning, often the same words: the stereotype is a political fact, the major figure of ideology.

Barthes, Roland

10.

Never resist a sentence you like, in which language takes its own pleasure and in which, after having abused it for so long, you are stupefied by its innocence.

Baudrillard, Jean

11.

Language is a form of human reason, which has its internal logic of which man knows nothing.

Levi-Strauss, Claude

12.

For me, words are a form of action, capable of influencing change.

Ingrid Bengis

13.

They have been at a great feast of languages, and stolen the scraps.

William Shakespeare

14.

The word of man is the most durable of all material.

Schopenhauer, Arthur

15.

Drawing on my fine command of the language, I said nothing.

Benchley, Robert

16.

Any language is necessarily a finite system applied with different degrees of creativity to an infinite variety of situations, and most of the words and phrases we use are prefabricated in the sense that we don't coin new ones every time we speak.

Lodge, David

17.

Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire.

Barthes, Roland

18.

Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.

Kraus, Karl

19.

The universal principle of etymology in all languages: words are carried over from bodies and from the properties of bodies to express the things of the mind and spirit. The order of ideas must follow the order of things.

Vico, Giambattista

20.

Language shapes the way we think, and determines what we can think about.

Whorf, Benjamin Lee

21.

The language of truth is unadorned and always simple.

Ammianus, Marcellinus

22.

The English language is rather like a monster accordion, stretchable at the whim of the editor, compressible ad lib.

Burchfield, Robert

23.

He can compress the most words into the smallest ideas of any man I ever met.

Abraham Lincoln

24.

Those who know nothing of foreign languages, knows nothing of their own.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

25.

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

26.

My God! The English language is a form of communication! Conversation isn't just crossfire where you shoot and get shot at! Where you've got to duck for your life and aim to kill! Words aren't only bombs and bullets -- no, they're little gifts, containing meanings!

Roth, Philip

27.

Language is a process of free creation; its laws and principles are fixed, but the manner in which the principles of generation are used is free and infinitely varied. Even the interpretation and use of words involves a process of free creation.

Chomsky, Noam

28.

To have another language is to possess a second soul.

Charlemagne

29.

We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native language. Language is not simply a reporting device for experience but a defining framework for it.

Whorf, Benjamin Lee

30.

Language is political. That's why you and me, my Brother and Sister, that's why we supposed to choke our natural self into the weird, lying, barbarous, unreal, white speech and writing habits that the schools lay down like holy law. Because, in other words, the powerful don't play; they mean to keep that power, and those who are the powerless (you and me) better shape up --mimic ape suck --in the very image of the powerful, or the powerful will destroy you --you and our children.

Jordan, June

31.

It is still not enough for language to have clarity and content... it must also have a goal and an imperative. Otherwise from language we descend to chatter, from chatter to babble and from babble to confusion.

Daumal, Rene

32.

Language furnishes the best proof that a law accepted by a community is a thing that is tolerated and not a rule to which all freely consent.

Saussure, Ferdinand De

33.

Language is the amber in which a thousand precious and subtle thoughts have been safely embedded and preserved. It has arrested ten thousand lightning flashes of genius, which, unless thus fixed and arrested, might have been as bright, but would have also been as quickly passing and perishing, as the lightning.

Trench, Richard Chevenix

34.

Words have a longer life than deeds.

Pindar

35.

The significance of language for the evolution of culture lies in this, that mankind set up in language a separate world beside the other world, a place it took to be so firmly set that, standing upon it, it could lift the rest of the world off its hinges and make itself master of it. To the extent that man has for long ages believed in the concepts and names of things as in aeternae veritates he has appropriated to himself that pride by which he raised himself above the animal: he really thought that in language he possessed knowledge of the world.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

36.

If we spoke a different language, we would perceive a somewhat different world.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

37.

We invent the world through language. The world occurs through language.

Pancoast, Mal

38.

I do not mind what language an opera is sung in so long as it is an language I do not understand.

Appleton, Sir Edward

39.

Poetry is the language of feeling.

Winter, W.

40.

Male supremacy is fused into the language, so that every sentence both heralds and affirms it.

Dworkin, Andrea

41.

To write or even speak English is not a science but an art. There are no reliable words. Whoever writes English is involved in a struggle that never lets up even for a sentence. He is struggling against vagueness, against obscurity, against the lure of the decorative adjective, against the encroachment of Latin and Greek, and, above all, against the worn-out phrases and dead metaphors with which the language is cluttered up.

Orwell, George

42.

Syntax and vocabulary are overwhelming constraints --the rules that run us. Language is using us to talk --we think we're using the language, but language is doing the thinking, we're its slavish agents.

Mathews, Harry

43.

Do not accustom yourself to use big words for little matters.

Samuel Johnson

44.

All true language is incomprehensible, like the chatter of a beggar's teeth.

Artaud, Antonin

45.

A linguistic system is a series of differences of sound combined with a series of differences of ideas.

Saussure, Ferdinand De

46.

Language exerts hidden power, like a moon on the tides.

Rita Mae Brown

47.

My words fly up, my thoughts remain below: Words without thoughts never to heaven go.

William Shakespeare

48.

If English is spoken in heaven. God undoubtedly employs Cranmer as his speechwriter. The angels of the lesser ministries probably use the language of the New English Bible and the Alternative Service Book for internal memos.

Charles, Prince Of Wales

49.

Language is not only the vehicle of thought, it is a great and efficient instrument in thinking.

Davy, Sir Humphrey

50.

Words are the physicians of the mind diseased.

Aeschylus